Man versus dinosaur. We all know the days are coming. In preparation for the ultimate war, there’s Primal Carnage. It’s to be a team-based FPS multiplayer, in which one side plays as the humans, the other the giant stompy reptiles. It’s from indie team Lukewarm Media, previously noticed for their unreleased mod/full game, Light Spire. But we’re focusing on dinosaurs just now, and Primal Carnage has just opened itself a website, announced a deal with Ungine, and offers a few tech videos to look at.

So far they’ve announced one of the five classes for each side, the humans’ Scientist and the dinosaurs’ T-rex. There’s also two announced game modes, Power Grid, a base-capturing 10v10 match, and Survival, a five-player human game in which the small team defends a moving base from AI dino attacks.

Apparently human play will be first-person, while dinosaurs controlled from the third. And the dinosaurs look splendid. For instance, here’s a t-rex stomping on a young lady:

And here’s a raptor causing a spot of trouble.

There’s talk of a beta in the near future. And hopefully we’ll get to see some proper in-game footage.

I wonder however if the dinosaurs will be able to move so smoothly when they’re actually being controlled by players (or an AI for that matter).

I mean, that T-Rex’s headswipe looked very cool, but it’s hard to imagine how you would let a player control something like that with a mouse and keyboard.

Maybe we found our killer app for that webcam Natal-wannabe thing!

PS. It would have been interesting to see what it would have looked like if they had decided to give the raptors feathers/plumage as they almost certainly had in real life. They had a great chance to do some original design here (colour/shape of feathers), but they chose to basically copy Jurassic Park instead. Not that I’m complaining really.

On the other part, modeling, animating and rendering feathered dinosaurs is just too hard now. Maybe worth for hollywood movies that just have to render 4 seconds and not in real-time, but on render farms.

Tei, what are you on about this time? If all else fails, paint feathers on as a flat texture. But, you know, I’m pretty sure we’ve all seen real-time 3D rendering of birds before. Human hair is arguably harder (not least as we tend to expect physics from it ever since the original Tomb Raider).

Also, in real life a velociraptor would have come up to about your waist. I guess they made them bigger in Jurassic Park to make them more intimidating but personally I’d find a set of befanged jaws coming at you at gonad-height infinitely more terrifying.

Well, they do say it’s just a raptor, so it being a utahraptor is more likely.

I think the general perception is that ‘scales’ is more scary than feathers (although I’ve never been more terrified than by Bulgakov’s monstrous ostriches in the Fatal Eggs). General perception might also gawk at the the large bird lizard than the ‘coloquial’ depiction of raptors.

Utahraptor was larger than a human. No, what you have there sir is a Deinonychus, although that should be feathered too. So should Utahraptor as well, though.
When it comes to game design Jurassic Park > fact.
Palaeontology geek-out ends.

My main concern with this game is that dinosaurs have never really made particularly satisfying foes so whilst it could be crotch-expandingly fun to play as a Fictionoraptor, fighting them mightn’t be as great.

OH MY GOD OH MY GOD WHAT A GREAT IDEA.
WHAT AN AMAZING AWESOME IDEA. WHY HASN’T THIS BEEN DONE BEFORE?????????????????????????????????????????????????????
Anyways, caps lock off… Seriously, my natural inclination for a game where you control dinosaurs in third person is “where do I put my money?”. That said, if it is bad (it IS an indie dev team, after all), I won’t purchase.

It’ll take a lot of short comings to make me not want to purchase this game though. WOOOOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOOOOOO CAN’T WAIT!!!!!

‘Monkey mode’ being a version of Juggernaut where instead of a Juggernaut, you have a monkey with low health and no weapons. If you pull the trigger as the monkey, he just goes ‘ook ook!’. He’s a little faster than most of the characters in the game, but raptors are faster. With my friends and I, this led to many situations in which the monkey player cowers behind a pillar while the raptor pack cruises around the level, taking its time, peeking (with real head-swinging animation) behind all the crates and in all the corners. Just like the kitchen scene from Jurassic Park. Developers everywhere, I implore you – listen to your sense of humor and creativity! If you come up with a funny idea at lunch and all your mates laugh about it, maybe it could go into the game. ‘Raptor vs. Monkey’ DLC could improve almost any multiplayer game. Bad Company 2, Halo, Crysis, whatever… It’s a relatively little thing, and it’s undeniably awesome.

This team has a great idea, anyway. We can’t speak for gameplay yet but clearly the animation team is talented.

I’m not into competitive FPSes, but dammit this looks so much WIN. Although I remain skeptical over how any reasonably realistic person could still survive enough to scream after being chomped upon by a T-Rex.

Sounds like a good idea. But… asymmetric Multi Player games/mods can be kind of hit or miss. I hope this works out well… so much scope for ideas, especially with the dinosaurs. There’s lots of opportunity for a large scope of gameplay… Humans vs. 1 T-Rex, Humans have to play smart, hide, set up ambushes and traps, while T-Rex is hard as nails, fast when he gets up to speed and able to eliminate a single, isolated human (or a close together group) in many varied, bloody, and interesting ways.

Or… as has been said, a sort of L4D(inosaurs)… swarms of AI controlled, weak, small dinos, plus some ‘specials’ vs Humans.

Or… Humans vs Raptors in a Hunter/Hunted dynamic. Squad of each, Humans with high tech gadgetry and weapons, Raptors with their natural abilities… fighting it out in various environs… Jungle/buildings.

This is obviously going to be compared to L4D, rightly so, aside from the obvious dinos instead of zombies. Such a game would be welcome in my collection.

I always did like old dinosaur games but there was never any really good ones… i remember Carnivores, and some other one that had weird controls for the guns and looked like you were in Jurassic Park in the game, though i dont think it was related. The guns waved around in your view or something too. I forget really.

Seems like an awesome concept, but the raptor animationw as rather lacking. There just didn’t seem to be any actual weight to the fall. But if it’s still in fairly early stages of development, there should be time to fix it.

I wish the team all the best – fantastic looking footage, but since the game’s multiplayer-focused, I can’t force myself to get excited for this…
Really, can anyone create Trespasser 2 or a similar, single-player oriented survival game already?

Best wishes to them. I read an interview of the lead designer/ brains behind the project and he seemed to have a really good idea of what he was doing and how he wanted to make original games such as this. IIRC, he dropped out of High School at 17 and worked for a casual game studio for just a few years before getting to where he is today.

I also think that he explained that the studio is far from tradition in that it isn’t located in one location; the employees live all over the country.

awesome idea! I hope they will include some animations for the big dinosaurs when they get shot.
the game sounds fun playing as a dino but takin down a really big big dino with a rifle will be twice as fun if they have a proper damage model and such